Cross-cultural Conceptualization of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the Media: the force Metaphor

Abstract

Merging Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has brought new perspectives to analysing social reality (Van Dijk, 2001; Musolff 2004; CharterisBlack, 2005; Hart, 2010). Accordingly, this paper adopts Critical Metaphor Analysis as first suggested by Charteris-Black (2005, 2014) and seeks to investigate a social phenomenon – the financial and economic crisis – in Lithuanian and British media. The aim of the research is to analyse to what extent the media in the UK and Lithuania conceptualize differently the financial and economic crisis via the force metaphor. The paper explains the force metaphor by employing the Force-Dynamics System (Talmy, 2000), according to which a crisis is conceptualized following the patterns crisis as the agonist and crisis as the antagonist� The findings demonstrate that the pattern of the crisis as the agonist with the scenarios of aggression, affecting something or somebody, natural force, loss, suffering and resistance prevails in both discourses. The pattern of the crisis as the antagonist with such scenarios as causing crisis, fighting against crisis, overcoming crisis falls behind. Though Lithuanian and British discourses differ in how they construct the scenarios, the rhetorical impact of the force metaphor is achieved similarly through telling a coherent story of the crisis: the crisis is a dangerous, threatening and aggressive entity, which affects the country and its people; it is apparently uncontrollable, and losses and suffering are inevitable; we look into the causes of the crisis, we fight against it and finally we overcome it.